Out with the old, in with the new… It’s been a time of change in my life and thus I haven’t had time to post here, having recently started a new job. But I found a recent blog entry that is really interesting, and wanted to share it with you. It’s titled Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India Cheap Overseas Programming, and I honestly can’t agree more. I’m not a programmer by trade — I’m a systems guy through and through, but the best systems guys (and I’d like to consider myself pretty good), are ones that can read code, and know what object oriented code looks like, and understand all concepts of code on at least a high level.

My own experience is similar with this; I decided to undertake a project with a limited budget, and wanted to see what was out there on sites like ODesk.com and others. I posted the project description and got what I thought was a treasure trove — lots of people responded to me, and I then had the opportunity to interview them. And as I went through the interviews (this was a .NET/Silverlight project), I realized that almost all of the programmers didn’t understand what object oriented code even was, most didn’t understand XAML (they used the GUI in Visual Studio) and few could give me an example in pseudocode for an iterative loop. I was stunned.

I realized then, as this article reinforces, that you get what you pay for in terms of programming. Programmers that have to support a project build it to maintain it easily. At the heart of the best IT professional lies a lazy person, and it’s true in programming too. It’s build in object oriented code and layered properly so that when a programmer has to expand, support, tweak, debug, etc… it’s a LOT easier. Writing the code is probably the easiest part, it’s the layout and structure of the code that is difficult. But once you’ve built your framework, it will get easier over time. And in overseas programming, you have basically got “code monkeys” who will churn out LOTS of cheap code, but with no organization or structure, will cost a lot more in the long run.

That said, I know the holidays are coming up so have a happy holiday all!